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I'll keep it simple. Every time that you didn't feel like you did well in an interview question, go home and study to get better at those questions.

Unless you're applying to a research lab, realize that you're applying to jobs that you're probably underqualified for. Your PhD says that you haven't been making production quality code for a few years.

E.g. Learn the damn stl containers. It takes a fucking weekend. They have very similar APIs and are mostly sensible. Just because you finished a PhD doesn't mean that you're done learning, much the opposite.

There's an offline gmail chrome app that lets you work that way. Also, turn on two-factor for them. They can receive the number via SMS, and it'll help prevent them from being phished. Once set up, it's easy to understand how to do it, and they only need do it every month. (There are a few email providers that provide 2-factor).

gmail can check a pop3 account on your behalf, and you can set your 'from' address (I haven't checked the constraints on what you can set it to...). So there's not necessarily a need to change email addresses to use gmail.

if gmail is blocked, then you're in an unusual situation where nobody here can give you good advice without knowing more about what's going on.

I'm advocating gmail here for three reasons:(1) Really good spam filters and phishing warnings that can help keep out scams(2) Two-factor authentication(3) Easy setup with a chromebook.

With the last, they can keep all their stuff on drive (and you can just log into drive to help them), and you can chromote in to see their desktop and help. Even video-chat while chromoting.

If enough of them have young kids (and your 40+ years - 10 puts many of your peers in the mid-30s), then they'll be going through the same stuff, only have less experience. Come in as the voice of wisdom and experience. It's useful!

Just don't spend too much time talking about old systems. Some older programmers do that, and it just distances themselves unnecessarily. Having used an older system isn't a technical merit, it's just saying that you're old. Interesting anecdotes, special features, and spectacular failures of old systems, however, are fun to hear.

Here's how I ran my PhD simulations on EC2:- The AMI downloads a manifest file at startup.
- The manifest has one record per line, two fields per record: the s3 URL of a.tar.gz to download, and the path to download it- The AMI then runs a shell script (/etc/run.sh) that's been put there by a manifest entry

Shell scripts upload new files to s3 (e.g.,/etc/run.sh) and have ec2 run new VMs. When the VMs are loaded, they're running everything I need, ready to go.Other shell scripts stopped/started experiments on these VMs.Other shell scripts shut down the VMs when I'm done.The scripts did little more than scan the appropriate machine list from the ec2 tools and ssh into them with a specific command.

At the end, I had some of the experiment-specific scripts quickly have git clone/pull in files I was changing quickly per experiment.

All of it worked really well for me. Nothing fancier than the ec2 command-line tools, bash, ssh, & git necessary.

It's 2012, why does this search engine stuff come up all the time, when it's *so* easy to fix? If they want to publish the names, but not have them come up when people are searching for individual people, shove the list in robots.txt. Not complicated. A moron can figure out robots.txt

As another hacked reader, yeah I'm unhappy about this too. Considering that I was donating to wikileaks before, this is just painful.

Stratfor's just come out with their email, 8pm, not great, but here we are. They've done the standard 1yr prepaid monitoring service for identity theft.

I looked around to verify that my CC was actually breached (who knows, maybe it was a card I've already canceled?), but all the primary copies of the CC list seem inaccessible. It'd be lovely if they were taken down before I become collateral damage in all this, but it hasn't exactly been a lucky week.

Canceling the card, and watching the account like a hawk. It's all we can do, and hopefully it's enough.